What a silver screen is used for
- Judging uniformity at a brighter level than mid grey
- A neutral, low-glare background for long working sessions
- A neutral reference for spotting colour cast without white’s glare
Silver screen online: #C0C0C0 at full screen
Silver is #C0C0C0 — all three channels at 75%. It sits usefully between white and mid grey: bright enough to reveal uniformity problems in the upper range, dim enough not to saturate the eye the way full white does.
In practice it is close to perceptual mid-grey. Because of display gamma, #808080 emits only about a fifth of white’s luminance, so the value that actually looks halfway between black and white is nearer #BCBCBC — a shade off silver.
Like all neutral fields, any colour visible here is the display adding it.
How to get a full screen silver background
Press the fullscreen button on the player above, or the F key. Escape returns you to the page. On a desktop browser F11 does the same job and hides the browser's own toolbars as well.
The colour box is a control, not a picture: use the hex field to enter any value, pick another shade from the palette, or download the current colour as a PNG at your screen's resolution. Whatever you set is written into the address bar, so the link you copy reproduces exactly what you are looking at.